| I think the full quote is better: > "A decade ago, 80 percent of Americans believed that a free market economy was the best economic system. Today, that number is 60 percent. Another recent poll shows that only 42 percent of millennials support capitalism." Note how the author equivocates capitalism with free market economies. Almost all of us do this, including, presumably, the surveyed millennials. But capitalism is not the same as free markets, and strictly speaking there's no way to get away from free markets. Market dynamics are natural phenomena like gravity--you can't opt out of markets--and the qualifier "free" simply begs the question of how free. As we all know there's no such thing as a perfectly free market. In the really long term, whether "Capitalism" or "Socialism" wins out will be precisely because one or the other maximizes social wealth for some poorly understood cost function. You sort of hint at that when saying that "in an ideal world, government would 'take over' mature industry". I say poorly understood cost function because we don't even have solid working definitions for concepts like "equality" or "equity", let alone an ability to quantitively assess them, even though we all nominally claim we strongly value them (and as social animals undoubtedly do). But whatever the objective definition of those things, maximizing them may superficially appear socialist but in truth be necessary for maximizing other kinds of wealth like widget output or capital liquidity. Would that make it Socialist or Capitalist? |
Conversely, to some a mild social democracy is socialism. Case in point: the US's debate on establishing an european style national health service.
Therefore, not only are these polls heavily biased, they are meaningless as they aren't based on objective definitions of those concepts.